Carry On
by Forever Jake
Summary: Probably the low point of my writing carreer. A songfic, with a different take on all of King Arthas' 'successes'.


There was a monster that night, and he sat in the midst of the other monsters and watched the fires they'd lit burn down, down, down. The fire was strange against the swirling backdrop of snow and wind and blank, bleak skies. It roared, defiant, against the frozen air, just as it burned in the very eyes of the victims within it. It was a circle of dying flames, consuming itself as all life does... defiant... defiant to the last.

The monster chuckled as he thought that once, he had been such flesh... such weakness. He had been a boy, a prince. He had been such foolish things.

The other monsters stamped their feet and howled monstrous howls. They knew. They knew what foolishness had come before. They knew what foolishness it was they were burning.

_Once I rose above the noise and confusion  
__Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion_

I thought I knew everything, he thought. But I knew nothing. The everything I know now is empty, it is the very essence of nothing... but it is all there is.

_I was soaring ever higher  
__But I flew too high_

The monster gritted his flat, white fangs against one another. He was restless... eager for something to happen, something he did not understand anymore. There used to be more, he knew, more than just this endless white. But that was the pale, puny weakness of life. That time was over long ago.

_Though my eyes could see I still was a blind man  
__Though my mind could think I still was a mad man_

He had put them to the sword. All of them, the great unwashed, the great masses of the unworthy. They were not fit for this grand, pure kingdom he had forged, this endless palace of white. The dead returned to him, sometimes, to whisper their curses of him. But he had died before them all, and knew better than any that the dead tell no tales. Ghosts' words are as insubstantial as their bodies. He tuned them out.

_I hear the voices when I'm dreaming  
__I can hear them say_

The monster shook his head numbly. The cold cut him, but it, too, he had long learned to tune out. Wind could not truly hurt one such as he. Such elementary powers were nothing to it... his grand cause precluded such nonsense. His work was too important... he was too important. His importance made him powerful just as their insignificance made them weak.

_Masquerading as a man with a reason  
__My charade is the event of the season  
__And if I claim to be a wise man, well  
__It surely means that I don't know_

In the distance, he heard the ocean rumbling. It irked him. Like the incessancy of the fire, and of all the things that had ever stood in the way of his great, pure world, its existence meant only another day of work. Another day of fires that devoured themselves. Another day of wind that swept itself away.

_On a stormy sea of moving emotion  
__Tossed about I'm like a ship on the ocean  
__I set a course for winds of fortune  
__But I hear the voices say_

They always thought they'd be around long after him. Great heroes they thought themselves. Great fools they had been! They were long gone, ghosts of a past age that no one remembered, not even him. And here he still was... fighting them. Breaking them. He had always broken them... they had always been broken.

_No!_

He hardly knew them anymore, so long had it been since they'd fought him and his motives.

_Carry on, you will always remember  
__Carry on, nothing equals the splendor  
__The center lights around your vanity_

The great white clouds circled overhead like black vultures, waiting for the trailing smoke to subside.

_But surely heaven waits for you_

He blinked, looking down at the pyre. It was gone, long gone, as was the bodies it had contained. They, like everything else, had gone from the world. There was only him.

The other monsters had wandered off, they too doomed like all things to leave him. They traveled on into the void, while he traveled ever backwards toward the glory they'd all once had.

He sat a long time, watching skies, long after the smoke had vanished into the horizon. The sea made no more crash against the frozen shores, and the clouds ceased to circle. There was only him... only him.

_Carry on my wayward son  
__There'll be peace when you are done  
__Lay your weary head to rest  
__Don't you cry no more..._

A man walked along a beach, emerald waves glinting in the sun. The sand curved up, away from him. At the top of the burgh, he knew, a tiny cemetery laid, a single grave dedicated to some past lord. He'd seen it from time to time.

The name on the grave was Arthas Menethil. The man passed it and walked on down the beach, and the spot passed from his memory again.


End file.
